‘He makes France proud’: why Macron and the French elite still worship Gérard Depardieu
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The arrest of France’s most celebrated film star on two charges of recent sexual assault ought to occasion, in any normal circumstances, shock and outrage. Unfortunately, that star happens to be Gérard Depardieu, meaning the news is only capable by this point of generating a numb revulsion.
A 53-year-old woman claims that Depardieu, then 73, grabbed her and groped her breasts during filming of The Green Shutters (2022), while a second woman has accused him of sexual violence on the same set. A third woman alleged that he groped her “all over” and made inappropriate remarks while she was assisting on the set of The Magician and the Siamese (2015), but that charge has been dropped because the statute of limitations had expired. Depardieu denies all the accusations.
The problem is, we have been here so many times before – so often, in fact, that the defending of Depardieu by powerful factions of the French establishment has become as routine as the allegations brought against him.
Within the last year, at least 15 women have come forward alleging sexual assault or rape. Last December, when the documentary Depardieu: The Fall of an Ogre aired on the public service channel France 2, it certainly didn’t hold back in detailing why that description was deemed apt. For starters, it apparently showed this once-beloved icon sexually harassing a translator and making a sexual remark about a 10-year-old child, while on a visit to Pyongyang in 2018 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the North Korean state.
This film also interviewed the actor Charlotte Arnould, who in 2018 filed two charges of rape against Depardieu. Both of these alleged attacks occurred at Depardieu’s Paris home that year, when Arnould was 22, and Depardieu, a friend of her father, was 70. While Depardieu was formally charged on both counts in 2020, that case is still proceeding at a snail’s pace through the French courts. The actor’s lawyer said he “firmly rejected” the allegations.
As with all the other accusations that have surfaced against him, which stretch back decades, Depardieu flatly denies Arnould’s account: “I have never, ever abused a woman,” he wrote in an open letter last October, asserting that he was “neither a rapist, nor a predator.” “Hurting a woman would be like kicking the womb of my own mother.”
The same day as the documentary aired, one of Depardieu’s first accusers, Emmanuelle Debever, was found dead in the Seine, the victim of an apparent suicide. They had co-starred in the historical epic Danton (1982), when Debever was 19.
Her accusation came in the form of a 2019 Facebook post, in which she claimed he’d groped her while they were side-by-side in a carriage scene: “This monster allowed himself to enjoy plenty during filming, making the most of the intimacy… Sliding his fat paw under my skirt.” Hearing her account recapped in the documentary is thought to have driven Debever to her death.
International reaction after the exposé aired was swift and unsparing. Depardieu became the first ever person to be stripped of an honour given to him in Canada, the Order of Quebec, and the Swiss broadcaster RTS stopped showing any films in which he plays a leading role.
In France, however, rising calls to strip Depardieu of the Legion d’Honneur – the highest French order of merit, which was bestowed upon him in 2016 – were blocked at the very top. Although the country’s culture minister, Rima Abdul Malak, claimed to be disgusted by Depardieu’s sexist language and argued that his behaviour “shamed France”, Emmanuel Macron took a different view.
When asked by an interviewer for France 5 about the possibility of taking Depardieu’s title away, Macron replied “You will never see me participate in a manhunt… [I] hate that type of thing.” He went on to explain, “I’m a great admirer of Gérard Depardieu; he’s an immense actor … a genius of his art. He has made France known across the whole world. And, I say this as president and as a citizen, he makes France proud.”
Depardieu’s status as a megastar, and at one time France’s hottest acting export to Hollywood, is certainly well enshrined. He has been nominated for the Best Actor César a Streep-esque 17 times, winning twice, in 1981 and 1991. He consolidated his position as a national treasure around the time of Jean de Florette (1986), before scoring an English-language hit with Peter Weir’s Green Card (1990), being nominated for an Oscar in Cyrano de Bergerac (also 1990), and playing Christopher Columbus for Ridley Scott in the epic flop 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992). A decade-long spree of parts in US studio fare ensued, whether as imaginary friends (Bogus), dastardly furriers (102 Dalmatians) or portly musketeers (The Man in the Iron Mask).
Rather than trying to sustain a polyglot career, Depardieu instead made a bizarre post-millennial switch to buddying up with Vladimir Putin. In 2012, he moved to Belgium as a tax exile, to escape the 75 per cent “supertax” which then-President François Hollande – much more of a Depardieu critic than Macron – was imposing on the super-rich in France.
Straightaway, Putin granted him Russian citizenship, which he gladly accepted. He says the reason he gets along with Putin so well – prompting online memes of them rubbing noses – is that “we could both have ended up as hoodlums”.
Within the French film industry, opinion on Depardieu remains starkly divided, with plenty of support for Macron’s point of view. One petition published in the Right-wing Le Figaro, entitled “Don’t Erase Gérard Depardieu”, tried to denounce what it referred to as the actor’s “lynching”, and was signed by many of his friends and former associates, including the country’s first lady Carla Bruni, Charlotte Rampling, and Depardieu’s ex-wife, Carole Bouquet.
However, when it emerged that the originator of this text was a little-known actor called Yannis Ezziardi, who writes for an ultra-conservative magazine called Causeur and is reputedly close to Depardieu’s daughter Julie, several of the signatories distanced themselves from what they had put their names to – among these Bouquet, the film critic Serge Toubiana and filmmaker Jacques Weber.
Meanwhile, more than one counter-petition followed fast upon it. The most successful of these racked up 8,000 signatures, arguing that the Ezziardi text in support of Depardieu “spat in the face of his accusers”. Another petition entitled “Address to the Old World” gained traction from luminaries including Anouk Grinberg, the actress who not only co-starred with Depardieu in The Green Shutters and Merci La Vie (1981), but has a son with the latter film’s director Bertrand Blier, one of Depardieu’s most prominent collaborators and allies. Part of it read: “No one wants to erase the artist. But the talent of Gérard Depardieu does not permit the indignity of his behaviour.”
Grinberg has described how she and others on the set of The Green Shutters were “treated to his salacious nonsense from morning to night”, declaring to Agence France-Presse that “when film producers hire Depardieu on a film, they know they are hiring an aggressor”.
Other accusations have not been levelled against Depardieu as criminal charges, in some instances because of the statute of limitations under French law. This was the case with the actor Hélène Darras, whose complaint dates back to the shooting of the film Disco in 2007. A Spanish journalist, Ruth Baza, also came forward in 2023 to recount an incident from 1995, when she was a 23-year-old journalist, and she claims he kissed and groped her without her consent.
Depardieu was released on the same day as his arrest and will face a criminal trial in October. Whether the latest charges culminate in some kind of tipping point remains to be seen: his career is a whole series of presumed tipping points. While Depardieu has scaled back his filming engagements – since The Green Shutters two years ago and the delayed release of the chef drama Umami, there hasn’t been a leading role – he has never yet been convicted or slipped more than briefly from the industry’s embrace.
It might take legal proof of wrongdoing for the likes of Macron to renege on their hero-worship, but given the notoriously high bar for prosecuting cases of sexual assault, this maybe sends an awful message to the French public about how the reputation of famous men is protected, near-religiously, above the safety and credibility of women. The ogre may totter with each new grim complaint, but he still has a long way to fall.
